Participants in 2004

-Glenn Appleby explored ways to make information literacy part of the experience for his first year students in Fall 2004. The topic of his FYI was "How Do You Know What You Know? Episodes in the History of Science". Glenn also wanted to add a component to the Cultural Approaches to Mathematics class that might be called quantitative literacy. He is increasing the opportunities for students to use and evaluate numerical data to answer questions. He would like to find better ways to aid students in finding relevant statistical and other quantitative data. He finds that students don't really know where to look, or how to evaluate what they find.

-Pam Cook taught a scope and methods in political science course in the fall. In the first part of the course, the class discusses the research process and Pam usually has a session in the library. Students have complained about this session because they feel it is "too elementary." However, their assignments based on the library session don't reflect "over-comprehension." Pam reshaped the session and the assignment so that it doesn't seem remedial. The goal of the assignment is to discover valid criteria to use in selecting research resources especially in evaluating internet sources.

-Andrea Cox taught Astronomy in Fall 04 and the Physics Seminar class in Spring 05. What she has been primarily concerned with is getting students to use electronic sources effectively at all levels. This includes:
- Knowing what resources are (and are not) available to them electronically
- Being able to assess the appropriateness of these electronic sources for papers for given projects (reliability, level, etc.) and
- Knowing how to cite the sources in-text and in bibliographies in a reasonable and transparent manner.

-Tom Freeman and Ed Mathieu team taught an interdisciplinary course entitled The First World War in History and Literature. They created a presentation on internet sources about WWI in history, literature and art. They found and evaluated sites and information. They developed guidelines for students to teach them how to evaluate the reliability of internet sources and to cite these sources.

-Chuck Lewis participated in the information literacy forum in more than one capacity. He made a presentation at the forum relating the teaching of writing to information literacy and he provided suggestions for information literacy in your classroom. He also developed plans and ideas to apply in the courses he teaches.

-Roc Ordman built on information literacy strategies he has used in his Global Nutrition class in which everyone presents posters for the Undergrad Research Symposium. In preparation for that, students go through several stages of evaluating web sites on nutrition. In class, students compare ads, books, and professional journals, discussing what they tell us about nutrition and sources. Then they put together the sources for their posters based on class discussions. For more information, see Roc's information literacy page.

-John Rapp designed a research paper workshop section to use in many if not all of his upper level comparative politics courses. His fall class, "Politics of Advanced Industrial Democracies," where he always assigns a major research paper, was the first class in which he applied ideas from the forum. He worked on ways to do a better job of explaining to students how to conduct research, design a comparative research question and hypothesis, and cite sources properly. He was also interested in learning about web-based tools concerning plagiarism, as well as software facilitating peer review.